If you're willing to try Ubuntu 14.04, Unity 7 is not that bad to use as a tablet.
I advise to try and increase scale for menus and title bars on the display settings a bit, and see if it works for you.

I don't really like plasma active yet - it is too constrained, and mostly, not quite ready for daily use.

I am using Kubuntu 14.04 on my Acer Iconia Tab and it is working great. I don't have the gyroscope function working yet, but I have scripts to rotate the display and touchscreen associated with icons in a panel that allow me to reorient the screen to any configuration with a single touch.

I did have to install some proprietary drivers, particularly for the touchscreen to get multitouch functions working through ginn. Still pinch to zoom only works on certain applications/websites.

I am using onboard for my on-screen keyboard as I find it more stable and functional than the native KDE options.

Besides that, everything works - both cameras, bluetooth, wifi.....
I tried openSuse based on a report I found that it worked on the iconia OOTB, but that was not my experience. Kubuntu was far easier to get up and running.

Pretty easy, really. I downloaded the DVD iso and dd onto a 4GB flash drive. I rebooted and went to BIOS (<DEL> IIRC) and selected to boot from the flash drive (legacy UEFI had already been activated by the previous owner I guess). It booted and i selected install Kubuntu. I had no interest in keeping M$ as I use Linux excusively. Also, I came from Mandriva/Magea and prefer a separate /home partition, so I custom formatted to wipe the whole disk and set up separate partitions.

From there it just installed as if it was a laptop. I think the wifi driver worked out of the box with Kubuntu but not openSUSE. Touchscreen also worked as a usb mouse (no multitouch) out of the box for Kubuntu. I downloaded the GTouch drivers and installed them, and then installed the other packages I needed. Knowing this I think I could get openSUSE to work with the touchpad and wifi now, but I am happy with Kubuntu so I have left it.

As I said, I wrote (borrowed and modified really) a script that rotates the screen with XRandR and changes the touchpad orientation (the screen is run as an evdev device, so those commands work) with various parameter triggers for each of the four orientations possible. i created menu entries for each of the 4 options and put icons in the panel for each one. Now I just touch the orientation I need and it flips. In a way I prefer this to other tablets that sometimes flip against your wishes. I found that if you shutdown in a "non-normal" scrren orientation, it restarts with the screen in that orientation, but not the touchscreen. So I run the "normal" orientation command at KDE launch to "reset" everything regardless of the previous session. I also installed onboard and set it to launch at KDE launch so the keyboard is accessable right away.

That's pretty much it. I find the default (OSS) video driver works better than ATI's, and I can hotswap in my TV to watch media on XBMC or VLC. The touchscreen tends to get wanky so I have to dock it when I have it connected. One day I'll work that out with a quick evdev call script, but it hasn't really been a big enough problem for me to care enough to do it.

I also prefer PulseAudio so I installed that to control audio output, especially when I want to watch xbmc on the TV and stream audio to a bluetooth receiver.

So far it is my fvorite computer I have (besides my twin monitored desktop at work) I have had and makes me frustrated when I go back to my HP-mini netbook and try to touch the screen to select something.

GNOME 3 is quite a good touchscreen interface. Versions 3.8+ automatically inject drag-scroll (iPhone-esque) into all applications and the UI controls are definitely large enough to be used on a touchscreen with a high rate of accuracy. It has an application launcher similar to iOS or Android and a window overview similar to Exposé in OS X. However, you'll want to install a third-party virtual keyboard, as the GNOME default one barely works. Onboard is a good choice.

I use Gnome 3.12 on a converted Acer C720p Chromebook running Fedora 20. The 'p' version is the C720 with a touch screen.

It took some tweaking of the X11, compiling of drivers, and other things to get the touch screen (there was some X11 settings that tweaked the touchscreen interface to make it more finger friendly), power management, and suspend working well.. but the Gnome stuff worked pretty well out of the box with the touchscreen once the rest of Linux was configured correctly.

I don't really see any sign of multitouch support (pinch zoom, etc), but the scrolling and hitting of buttons works well. The combination of keyboard and touch screen works very well for Gnome, but I haven't tried any onscreen keyboards or gone touch screen only. The focus of Gnome to get away from having to use right click for everything really helps a lot. You can do things like 'point and hold' on the touch screen to bring up context menus.

Any sort of 'gnome' app works well enough. Scrolling, touch accuracy, and copy and paste works well in things like Gedit and Nautilus. Anything not 'native Gnome' or at least GTK3 is really hit and miss. Firefox is fairly miserable to use by itself, however Chromium/Chrome works fine (but not as well as it did in ChromeOS unfortunately). There is a bit of oddness with the behavior of the windows decorations for Chrome/Chromium though.